Daddy Was Watching Her

My daughter loves cats. She has since she was a toddler.

Honestly, I don't remember how this story starts. My minds' eye doesn't see what I was doing or where her older brother was. He is strangely absent. This particular memory starts and ends with my husband 'keeping an eye on' our daughter while I did something in the house.

About twenty minutes into his voluntary duties, my mom 6th sense told me to go look in the garage and see how he and the three-year-old were doing. They were still alive. He was fiddling with something mechanical and she was sitting on the floor against the wall singing. On the garage floor, where it wouldn't have surprised me to see spiders. The garage floor, which truly wasn't clean enough to sit on. The garage floor, where I saw something that definitely didn't belong.

"Hey! I thought you said you'd watch her."  I whisper/hissed at him.

"Everything's fine," he insisted. "She's just sitting there singing to the kittens."

"Yeah, you're right. She's singing to them." I grabbed his arm and forced his full attention toward his adorable daughter. "Did you not notice that she has broken the necks of all four of them?"

I went over to her and gently removed a limp body from her tight little fists and placed it with the other three unfortunate kittens.

She had made up a lullaby to sing to her kitties. Since they needed to be rocked to sleep while she sang, she had taken them one at a time in a death grip about the neck and swung them back and forth.

How do you explain to a three-year-old that the kitties aren't going to wake up and play?

We took the kittens and a shovel into the trees and had a solemn cat funeral. We had a lesson about stroking kitties and not squeezing them so hard. We talked about never picking an animal up by the neck.

I would have been mad at my husband, but I have to confess that once when I thought she and her brother were playing nicely together in the yard, the mayhem led to my daughter getting eleven stitches.

Parenting is a learn as you go process. What a lot there was to learn.

Like the time I told the eye doctor my son didn't need shatterproof lenses.

Fly Away

Before the use of designer herbicides that target specific weeds or Round-up® Ready soybeans, a genetically modified crop which is resistant to glyphosate, farmers relied on pre-plant herbicides and  tillage to prevent and control unwanted weeds. In 1984 we had an outbreak of cockleburs in a soybean field we rented which was directly across the road from my in-laws' house.

A weed is any unwanted plant. It might have an economic benefit in some other setting, but in a field of corn, beans, wheat, flax, canola, or milo, for example, they are destructive. (See my 7-16-18 post about pigweeds.) Besides growing in the wrong place at the wrong time, the weed will drop seeds at the end of the growing season creating a worse problem in subsequent years. In our soybean field the cockleburs were stealing valuable nutrients and moisture.

What are cockleburs and what do they look like?  Click this link to see what mature seed pods look like. I believe George de Mestral, the inventor of Velcro®, had similar burrs in mind when he decided to create his hook and loop fastener. The burs are famous for fastening onto animal fur and will catch a ride on most fuzzy fabric as well. I didn't know it at the time, but all parts of the plant are poisonous to mammals. Although they are picky about where they grow, the plants are self-pollinating and like most weeds take advantage of favorable conditions.

The conditions were very favorable in our irrigated soybean field, and a large area where seeds had lain dormant in the ground had sprouted. The weeds could not be cultivated out. Too much damage would be inflicted on the leafy soybean plants. Since cockleburs have shallow roots making them easy to pull and I was young and enthusiastic, I decided to rogue the field myself.

The trouble lay with my two-year-old son. He was at that age when he didn't want to let Mommy out of his sight. He didn't want to stay in the house with Grandma either. He sure didn't want to take a nap. He wanted to help.

I had numerous conversations trying to make a toddler understand why he couldn't help and why it was important for him to stay with Grandma while I worked. I gave up on the project the day I looked up to see my mother-in-law chasing him down the road.

"How am I going to get the cockleburs out of this field?" I asked him.

He had the perfect solution.

"Don't worry, Mommy. The cocklebirds will grow up and fly away."